January 12th, 2026 Jeff Sprecher

Well, thank you all. I have a lot of friends here in the audience from many years of doing business here. I thought I would just start by talking a little bit about why my company is here, why I was here and a little bit about what we do beyond what Rafael graciously introduced. As Rafael mentioned, I went to Pepperdine University which is in Malibu, California and I met a guy in college and we started a company in California in the energy space to do alternative energy which really in that era was a tax credit deal. And I learned some of the ways of Wall Street and how to finance projects and create tax credits and strip them off a bit like what goes on in our state here around the movie industry. And as a result of that, I learned the electric power business. And I had this idea that you should be able to trade electric power, buy and sell electric power on an exchange. I had no idea how to do that. I'd never worked on Wall Street. I never traded. I don't even think I had a trading account. And by the way, I still don't have a trading account. Notwithstanding some of the acquisition things that people say about insider trading.

So I heard about a company that was based in Atlanta that was basically going bankrupt. It was owned by Mid American Energy, which is Warren Buffett's electric utility, and they had invested $35 million in this company here to try to create a network where electric utilities would exchange indications of interest for transmission capacity. And they tried, they spent the 35 mil. It didn't work and they were basically going to shut it down. So I heard about it, stepped in and made them an offer and I bought the company for a dollar a share and there were a thousand shares. So I bought it for $1,000 and I used that as the basis to build Intercontinental Exchange. The company was called the Continental Power Exchange and I was young and had a big ego and so I thought why would we limit ourselves to one continent so we should be intercontinental and why would we just be a power exchange we should be an everything exchange and so I changed the name to Intercontinental Exchange and a group of nine of us started building this technology. That was in year 2000 that was sort of the very peak and then fall of the dot era.

One of the reasons that Mid-America had put the Continental Power Exchange here in Atlanta was that this was at one point the nexus of connectivity to the internet. When all that fiber was going in the ground in the late '90s, it went north and south up the eastern seaboard and it went east and west and it intersected in Atlanta. And so they thought this is the place that if you were going to do something on the internet that you would want to do it. That obviously has been usurped now by Elon, you can be anywhere in the universe here now and satellites will point you to the internet. But at that time we were sort of known for our connectivity. So I got this idea to create an exchange and the team here started working on it. I lived in Beverly Hills. I'd been a serial entrepreneur and done pretty well as a young person. And so I would commute out here. I bought a 500 foot one room studio apartment in Midtown and I would fly in and get on MARTA and go to my studio there where I bought a used car that I kept and I'd go into the office from time to time.

Anyway, the dang company took off and I was here all the time. And so, anyway, we then hired Kelly Loeffler, my wife. She was in private equity in Texas, and we hired her to come in and do our budget. And she ultimately wrote our offer document called an S1 that we used to go public. And so I started seeing her, we were both single and started seeing her and then I was spending more and more time here. And she lived in Dallas and she was commuting back and forth to Dallas, I was commuting back and forth to LA and we finally settled here and so it was an organic way of finding the city which we both come to love.

In 2001, the first year that we were in business, I acquired a company called the International Petroleum Exchange of London, which was the oil industries exchange where they discovered the price of oil by having guys in funny jackets stand on a trading floor and flash hand signals. And I thought, well, we should just move that to the internet for crying out loud. And so they actually sold me the business and then it dawned on me that there were a lot of exchanges in the world. So I acquired maybe somewhere close to 30 of the world's exchanges and it was really just a moment in time when you could see that you could go from analog to digital and today we're the world's largest exchange group. At one point, people know us because we own the New York Stock Exchange because it's so iconic, but I also acquired the American Stock Exchange, the Pacific Stock Exchange, the Chicago Stock Exchange. I acquired the Paris Bourse, the French Stock Exchange, the Dutch Stock Exchange, the Portuguese stock exchange, the Belgian Stock Exchange, the Brazilian stock exchange. So anyway, I kind of went around the world rolling up these businesses and moving them from analog to digital.

One of the byproducts of the business that I'm in is the data that comes out of an exchange. Everybody wants to see the price of stocks or commodities or what have you. Oh, by the way, I bought the New York Board of Trade, which is the coffee, cocoa, cotton exchange from the movie Trading Places. So that's one. So anyway, one of the byproducts is data and the people that had floor-based exchanges would sell their data to Reuters or Bloomberg who would distribute them on these networks. And I was like, why would we sell our data when we're on the internet? Like why wouldn't you just put the data on the internet? So I created a data company and we started then acquiring other people's data and building out data. Today we have 750 exchanges and brokerage firms and financial services firms that create data and we distribute that on behalf of them to a network. That's huge because most people in the world that are in finance want to get the data from the New York Stock Exchange.

And then the third thing that I've been working on in the last few years is that it seemed ridiculous to me in this era, this tech era, like most of your kids and grandkids here will go on Amazon and buy deodorant and when you check out it'll say, do you want to buy now and pay later? And yet when we go to buy a house which has a foundation which you can see on Google that you can't move somehow it takes 60 days to buy a house and it seemed backwards to me that the consumable stuff you can buy with no credit and the one thing that is in Pavlov hierarchy of needs that you're going to be the last thing you give up, your house, is hard to buy. So, I started acquiring, turns out that the process that banks and lenders go through to put a young couple in a house is a very complicated, highly regulated process. And so I bought the leading CRM tool, the leading underwriting tool, the leading closing tool, the leading network for registering mortgages, the leading settlement and calculation engines and what have you. So I bought about seven companies for around $25 billion and have put them all together on a network so that it all talks to each other so that anyone who wants to become a lender could get on this network and all of the infrastructure is there. It's hooked directly to Fannie and Freddie and to the capital markets and so anyway we now are the largest, we probably touch 90% of all mortgages in the US. We have about 3,500 lenders that use the network and it's kind of similar to an exchange in that it's just bringing people together. I think we have 100,000 notary publics that are on it that can close mortgages and what have you.

So I am, you know, probably like Rafael, I'm hoping that the interest rate environment will be very conducive, that your children will go buy their starter home. And so anyway, that's what my company does. I just maybe want to finish that. I don't like public speaking and I always turn down these opportunities. I'm not good at it. I don't like it. And I'm just a worker bee and I just want to work. And my bestie Shan Cooper came to me and said, 'Jeff, you've got to come to Rotary.' And I was like, 'Shan, please.' And she said, 'No, but I'm going to have Rafael Bastik interview.' And so anyway, I'm here because I wanted to honor a friend and somebody that has given almost a decade I assume now to public service. I'm aware of the sacrifices that people make in public service having married somebody like that. And anyway, I just wanted to say thank you for what you've done. And looking forward to your next.

Well, if I could do anything, if I could retire and do something else, I would like to be a watchmaker. I would like to make a watch. I would like to be alone in a room by myself, with a bunch of little tiny tools and a microscope. And I really would like to make something that, you know, would stand the test of time.

It's the truth. That's what I would do if I could start over again.

There's an opening on CBS that happened over the weekend.

Yeah, it's interesting because I started the company with this idea of creating a power exchange and today we are the US's power exchange, electric power trades on our platform and we're also the largest energy exchange in the world. At a moment in time when you have these AI needs that are going up and also a rewiring of the supply chain of how global energy moves and so that's a short-handed way of saying I think we're real well positioned because people trade in order to manage risk and exposure to those markets. And one thing that I don't think people appreciate is like in this tariff debate that we've been having in the US over the last year. It's very much about putting tariffs on third parties but underneath that there's really a desire by the US government, the current administration, to fix the balance of payments. And the easiest way to do that is to have these foreign entities buy US energy. And so we've become as a country a big export nation. And now potentially the rewiring of Venezuela and keeping that in our hemisphere and denying it from China has completely changed the dynamics of where are we going to get our energy and how much we going to pay for it. And I don't know that we know the answer to that yet, but we're kind of in the middle of this massive pivot that is a supply chain change much like what happened during COVID. And consequently, my company last year the trading of energy grew double digits and it's grown every single year since the year I started the company and we keep thinking okay every oil company in the world is already on our platform and everybody like you and I don't buy barrels of oil or MMBTUs of natural gas or megawatts of power. Like who's the next incremental buyer that would ever come to this platform? And as a result of the demands and kind of the widening of institutional and commercial users that care about the price of energy, that platform just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

I do and I mean I think it's kind of one of those all of the above strategies like it's not just about fossil fuels. We need, you know, we're going to need every form of energy, including wind, solar, anything that can get built and diversity is helpful. And so, we see it all. We run the largest renewables markets in the world. I run the largest carbon markets in the world. I run the EU's cap and trade markets, which continue to grow. So, I don't know. We just see this investment all over the world in anything that can produce power and get on the grid quickly. And it's kind of an all the above strategy.

Some people think I'm really smart and I'm like this is like so obvious. Come on.

Yeah. So, a couple things. First of all, I'm the same age as Steve Jobs would be if he was still alive. We were born at the same time. And he was like a mentor to me. I never met him and I just read about him when I was a kid. And I realized like Apple, Steve Jobs was Apple, right? But he didn't really write code or invent anything. He curated ideas that a lot of really smart people around him created. He just had good taste. And the first thing I figured out is surround yourself with really good people that have good ideas and then just curate them. Get rid of the stupid ones and embrace the good ones and you know that's partly why you look smart. But secondly, I acquired a lot of companies. I've probably done at least 50 acquisitions and I'm never the guy that walks in there and lowballs somebody. To me like the New York Stock Exchange, people said well what are you going to do with it? I'm like it's the New York Stock Exchange. Like there's the business model, right? Like it's one of one. What's it worth? I don't know, whatever the seller would say it's worth. That's what it's... it's like buying a piece of art that is one of one. And so my negotiating strategy and please now that you hear this don't try to... Steve Hennessy sitting next to me. He's going to sell me a car.

I just, if you're going to buy a trophy, then you're going to have to pay trophy prices and occasionally stuff gets mismarked and what have you. But, you know, I just think quality matters. Legacy, brand, all those kinds of things, they matter and they're valuable and they're hard to build. There are great entrepreneurs in this country that have built brands, you know, Google and Tesla and what have you. That's hard, man. It's much easier to buy somebody else's hard work and the sacrifice that many others made and then help take it to the next level. And so, you know, I think sellers like selling to me because it's like this guy's a laydown, you know. Anyway.

Yeah, I think that the idea when we do acquisitions is is there something that they can't do or won't do partly because of scale, distribution, capital. You know, I just invested, you may ask me about this company called Polymarket that you know, that thing has no revenue and we said we'll give you two billion, like that changed that company. So those things matter but not necessarily the purchase price.

Yeah, as a manager I let good people... the first thing I learned from going to an entrepreneur where I made every decision. Took the trash out, shut the lights out, answered the phone, bought the staplers and the paper for the photocopier. Like that was the way the company started. Yeah, you make every decision. And in the arc of building a company, you have to give up decisions. And one thing I learned very quickly is that 100% of the people that work for me make their decisions differently than I do. And you just got to get over it. Like I was a guy in college that would wait till the night before the test and I would cram. And I always had these kids that sat in the front row and they were like, 'Teacher, teacher.' And they would say to me like, 'Well, we're already done with our homework.' And I was like, that's not due for a month.

Anyway, yeah, you just learn like, okay, everybody's got a different style. And so I just measure people by results, you know, let's just agree on what the results are and however you're going to skin the cat, I'll be tolerant. And I'm incredibly tolerant of some silly ideas or methodologies that people use, but that work. And I don't know, and people, I think when you give people independence and support and tolerate their peccadillos, it's a good place to work.

And you got to pay them well, right?

Yes.

Yeah, and I learned something from Goldman Sachs actually who I admired when I was starting out because they were a partnership and I was like how do they have this legacy of this company that's like 100 years old and it continues to grow and so I created a management committee and we meet every week for 4 hours and we go through every part of the company and every single person on the management committee, I think there's 18 people, we go through everybody's business and we talk about everything and we fight and we argue we shouldn't do this or why'd you do that and we want to know, you know, I heard you were playing golf with so and so. Why did you take the day off? And all this backstabbing stuff that exists in a company, we go through all of it. And then our agreement is when we walk out of the room, we're all one. And if you got another issue, bring it next week. We're here, you know, and that all kind of works like this team mentality.

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I'm not a manager. I don't know how to manage people.

Well, Sam came to... I saw Sam when I walked in here, came to me when he was running the Metro Chamber and he said, and nobody even knew who I was and somehow he found me and he said, you know, there's the Atlanta way here and the Atlanta way is we all got to contribute and I'm like, you know, hey, I'm like nobody. I'm building a company and I'm busy and he really got in my head and he kept working on me and got me into the chamber and the next thing you know I met half you guys in the room and we started doing other things and other things and other things and I just feel like Atlanta has this, I don't know what it is in the water here but we all, it's bipartisan, it's ageless, we all come together for the betterment of the city and it's gone on like that since the civil rights movement and maybe before. And I don't know, it's one of the great things about this city. I actually pulled back a little bit from my direct civic involvement when my wife went into the Senate because a bunch of you guys came up and said, 'You need to tell your wife to do so and so and would you tell the president to do so and so?' And I realized like I'm not that, it's not my job. I'm not a messenger. But I still philanthropically and what have you, you know, we and to honor people like you, it's just such a great thing that just doesn't exist in any other city. And so I don't know, thank you, Sam. And thank you all for befriending me over the years.

And you lived...

There's nothing like this. Like people in LA don't even say they're from LA. They say they're from Beverly Hills or Santa Monica or wherever. It's just a very very different thing.